As Mac Pro stagnates, PC workstations muscle ahead

Like many Mac-based creative professionals, I followed this year's WWDC keynote anxiously, awaiting the "one more thing" that never came: an E5 Xeon refresh of the Mac Pro line. Its absence was brutally disappointing; thankfully, Tim Cook broke his vow of secrecy to reassure us that a new Mac Pro will arrive in 2013. But for filmmakers compressing hours of 4K footage or school labs in need of new Maya machines, that’s a long time to wait—perhaps too long. Since I was also in the market for a machine to help out with my V-Ray renders, I decided that the time had come to evaluate my alternatives. The current Westmere-based Mac Pro line is definitely out of sync with what’s available elsewhere, and it is no longer competitive from a price-to-power standpoint.

I have heard it said that Dell, HP, and Apple split the workstation market pretty much three ways; whether or not this is true, it did seem worth taking a look at how the other big boys’ hot-rods rolled. The HP Z820 and Dell Precision T5600 are both monstrous dual-socket Intel E5-2665 Xeons clocked at 2.4GHz and, if I had to guess, I’d say that they are much like what would have replaced the dual Westmere Xeon 2.66GHz Mac Pro that I reviewed in 2010.

Of course, you can still build your own workstation, but I’m writing this for an audience who needs top-tier support and doesn’t want to chase six different companies when something goes wrong. I have my own overclocked 3930K gaming rig dual-booting Linux and Windows, but as I’ve pointed out countless times in the comments section of my Mac Pro reviews, a workstation needs to do one thing: keep working. Vendor support remains key to making this happen.

That’s where the Mac Pro, Dell T5600, and HP Z820 come in. We'll start our cage match with the HP Z820... since it was the first machine to arrive for testing.

Review of the HP Z820

Specs as reviewed:

Dual E5-2665/8 Core/2.4GHz with 20MB cache

Intel® C602 chipset

16GB quad-channel RAM (16 DIMM slots total, 4 used in this config)

NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2GB (1 dual-link DVI, 2 DisplayPort output)

500GB – Windows 7 Professional

Dual-layer DVD-RW

HP keyboard and mouse

Since you can get Linux for these machines instead of Windows 7, I also tested this machine with an HP-provided Redhat Linux boot disk. More on that later.

Standard Ports:

4 USB 2.0 on back, 1 on front

2 USB 3.0 on back, 2 on front

1 Firewire 400 on back, 1 on front

2 Gigabit ethernet on back

1 VGA out

PS/2 keyboard and mouse on back

Stereo output on back

Headphones out on front

Mic input on back and front

Expansion slots:

3 PCIe Gen3 x16

1 PCIe Gen3 x8

1 PCIe Gen3 x4

1 PCIe Gen2 x4

1 PCI

Price as configured: $6,840 with discount active at time of review

HP has a lot of high-end products, and the company is no stranger to content creators. For instance, its 30-bit Dreamcolor monitors are exceptional, and if you bought one of these monitors and hooked it up to a Mac Pro, you’d actually be throwing away color (Apple still hasn’t added support for 10-bits-per-channel color to OS X). My Z820 and Dell T5600 review units came with a Quadro 4000; both Nvidia and AMD restrict high-bit output to their pro line by means of their drivers, so both workstations can take advantage of these high-bit displays.

Unfortunately, I don’t own a 30-bit display, but the Quadro 4000 works fine with my dual NEC 2490WUXi monitors in both Windows 7 and CentOS 6.3.

The price tag

Before I cover the hardware and software features of the Z820, let's talk about that slight sticker shock. The first thing that jumped out at you about the Z820 was probably not its 32-thread CPU or giant cache—it was the price tag of $6,840, sans tax. We don’t tend to think of Mac Pros as "the cheap retail option," but workstation retailers like HP, Dell, and BOXX consistently come in at a higher price than the equivalently specced Mac Pro. This time around, the situation is obviously different, since Apple doesn’t even offer a Xeon E5 machine, but it is typical and there's a good reason for it: on-site support.

The HP Z820 and Dell T5600 both come with three-year on-site warranties, while the Mac Pro has one-year standard AppleCare (you can buy an added two years of AppleCare for $250). The difference is significant. AppleCare through a local Apple store or certified Apple repair outlet works well if you live in a major city and can afford a few days of down time, but an on-site warranty is like having a hotline to a dude ready to run out to your office to fix your problem the next day. It's meant to ensure minimum down time in case something goes wrong, like when a power supply fails.

This level of service adds a lot of risk to the profitability of a machine for workstation vendors. If you live in Cheesehole, Wisconsin—away from an HP- or Dell-certified repair guy—they will still put their dude on a plane to fix your computer, for three years, at no additional cost.

An on-site warranty is a standard in enterprise environments, and Apple says that AppleCare includes on-site coverage... but I’ve never once had them send a technician to my office in 20+ years of using Macs. They always tell you to bring the machine in, and even at large Apple stores, parts aren’t stocked, so there's at least a two-day down time for repairs.

On-site coverage is computer life insurance, and it’s expensive. Given that level of service, the $6,840 price tag of the Z820 is very reasonable; whether the added premium is worth it remains between you and your wallet.

The case

The Z820 was the first of the PC machines to arrive, and it instantly looked and felt like a solid workstation. It’s quite heavy and about the same size as the Mac Pro case, with about half an inch more in the width and two inches less in the height thanks to the front and rear handles being integrated into its 5U rack-mountable profile:

The front sports three optical bays, two USB 3 ports, one USB 2 port, a headphone jack, a mic input, and a Firewire 400 connector. It might seem funny for a new machine to incude such an old Firewire port, but it can come in handy for older DV cameras. (You can have the Dell T5600 configured with a 1394a card as well.)

Despite its heft, the Z820’s exterior is mostly plastic, with two solid metal sides. The plastic is not cheap-feeling and the finishing and tight coupling with the metal make it feel rugged and worth the money. When I look at the design of a workstation, I consider its resale value. When you sit next to a used Mac Pro with a prospective buyer, it’s easy for them to want—it’s beautiful, solid, and air-tight. The Z820 is what I’d imagine a competing case would look like.

Once you crack open the case, the Z820 continues to impress. The four 3.5" drive bays are stacked at the front of the unit, which I found really helpful when doing some swapping and rejigging:

The toolless HD mounting brackets of the Z820 are nice, and have a firm snap-and-lock mechanism for setting them securely in place within the drive bay. As in the Mac Pro, you can have drives resting harmlessly in the bay without being connected. The plastic brackets felt a bit flimsy at first, but they were fine even with a lot of disk swapping. It does seem a little weird that a newer workstation wouldn’t have SSD mounts, but my Icy Dock SSD-to-HDD enclosure fit fine in one of the bays.

Full-size ATX fiends will whine about how four drive bays are too few, but my Corsair 550D and its four optical drive bays (three empty) and six hard drive bays are overkill—and of dubious value considering the 550D is designed for low noise and heat. Video professionals will have external RAID arrays connected to PCI cards or by Thunderbolt, not a bunch of disks inside their machine. The smaller size is more portable and lowers the overall heat of the PCs, so I prefer this approach. But you do need a balance between expandability and size, and the Z820 is right in the sweet spot in my opinion.

The PCI slots are easily accessible and cable management is exceptional. There are no screws for the PCI cards—they get locked in place by a small door that closes when the case is shut. Smart, time-saving features like this are something you will appreciate if you’re upgrading a lab of these. Once you take off the PCI and mainboard compartment doors, all the RAM is easily accessible:

The Z820 has 16 DIMM slots, twice that of the current Mac Pro, so presumably you could upgrade it to 128GB with 8GB chips vs. 64GB total for the Mac Pro (which would be a bad idea anyway, because the Mac Pro uses triple-channel memory). But honestly, I don’t see this as a huge advantage. I do 3D for print (high res 32-bits-per-channel images) and run virtual machines and almost never page out with just 24GB. Nevertheless, if you need a ridiculous amount of RAM, the Z820 will accommodate it.

The power supply is modular and easily pulled out by a similar handle and snap-bracket that the hard drives have. This is clearly a machine that's well-engineered from head to toe.

264 Reader Comments

Was expecting a thorough kick on the Mac Pro's computational power's behind when I opened the link to this article, turns out reality was more varied than that. I can now certainly appreciate why some feel left out in the cold by Apple.

Solid reviews, the Dell was disappointing for me - I previously watched some vids that seemed to give high marks to the T5600 for being designed from the ground up for both function and aesthetic appeal. I am excited to see what Apple brings us next year after seeing that the old Pro still has some fight left in it despite its years.

Thanks for the great summary from a professional graphics point of view. Apple's huge middle finger to MP users on top of years of neglect still stings, and despite Tim Cook's weak backtracking it's probably a good indicator of how things will go in the future. So it's useful to see an evaluation of serious alternatives from both a hardware and software perspective. I'm sorry Linux isn't a bit stronger there, but perhaps increased demand will encourage progress. I wouldn't mind paying for Linux applications anymore then I do for Mac applications.

Performance of recent Kepler Geforce cards is apparently very bad in Maya under Windows, from what I've seen on CGSociety's hardware forum.

Isn't compute performance for Kepler in general quite mediocre, period? Might not just be an issue of drivers, last I checked Nvidia had difficulties with "Big Kepler" and had to push back the launch, and the more purely gaming focused GK104 gets generally slaughtered in compute by both GCN and Nvidia's own previous gen Fermi products. Just not the focus of the chip, although GK110 will presumably fix all that.

inpher wrote:

Also: I predict Popcorn Time in this thread.

Eh, maybe I guess. It's a pretty niche topic though (the whole market is pretty niche for that matter) and there's nothing controversial here. More then anything else it's interesting to get hints at how different pieces of architecture come together when you really push a system.

Before I begin, I should confess I personally like the latest set of Dell products and have a bit of a bias here. As a result, I'm primarily going to be replying to the Dell portion - I think the HP part of the review is well done.

This was unexpectedly sloppy journalism, and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed here. Your precision is overpriced and the wrong model to have head to head against the Z820. You compared the middle of the road workstation from Dell to the top-end from HP, and then priced it $600 higher than you can configure your exact specs on Dell's site: http://i.imgur.com/fQ6SC.png

The Dell bit almost starts out dripping with disgust for this system even when it's irrelevent:

// Any benefit the RAID could give to application load times are irrelevant, because internal timers for renderers don’t start until the application is loaded into RAM, so it’s not reflected in any scores. //

// but onboard video isn’t much use to professional graphics apps—so I didn’t try it out. //

It's these subtle clues and then this bombshell that should have been right up front:

// To be fair, this wasn’t a brand new machine that I received right from Dell’s lab //

That make me consider this article rubbish. Wait - did you receive this machine second-hand and then have the audacity to complain about damage done to it after the fact? If so; very disappointing.

The machine you should have compared the HP workstation to would have been $600 cheaper than you quoted for the other machine, and would have countered all your arguments against it, from lack of PCI-express ports to number of hard drive bays (and hot-swap, no less!)

Call a mulligan on this one and review the right machine - I'm sure Dell would be happy to send you a machine after their PR department reads this article.

Before I begin, I should confess I personally like the latest set of Dell products and have a bit of a bias here. As a result, I'm primarily going to be replying to the Dell portion - I think the HP part of the review is well done.

This was unexpectedly sloppy journalism, and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed here. Your precision is overpriced and the wrong model to have head to head against the Z820. You compared the middle of the road workstation from Dell to the top-end from HP, and then priced it $600 higher than you can configure your exact specs on Dell's site: http://i.imgur.com/fQ6SC.png

The Dell bit almost starts out dripping with disgust for this system even when it's irrelevent:

// Any benefit the RAID could give to application load times are irrelevant, because internal timers for renderers don’t start until the application is loaded into RAM, so it’s not reflected in any scores. //

// but onboard video isn’t much use to professional graphics apps—so I didn’t try it out. //

It's these subtle clues and then this bombshell that should have been right up front:

// To be fair, this wasn’t a brand new machine that I received right from Dell’s lab //

That make me consider this article rubbish. Wait - did you receive this machine second-hand and then have the audacity to complain about damage done to it after the fact? If so; very disappointing.

The machine you should have compared the HP workstation to would have been $600 cheaper than you quoted for the other machine, and would have countered all your arguments against it, from lack of PCI-express ports to number of hard drive bays (and hot-swap, no less!)

Call a mulligan on this one and review the right machine - I'm sure Dell would be happy to send you a machine after their PR department reads this article.

Re: The rest, incredibly sloppy on someone's behalf getting the machine to you, but it doesn't make the clearly negative bent at the beginning good journalism. Why critique what just, plainly, simply doesn't matter? Why deride specs about the machine only to going to disregard them the next clause?

The article comes off as having a hugely anti-Dell bent. The HP review is glowing, the Dell review is dour.

Thanks for the great article, Dave — as someone who has never, ever dealt with this kind of demanding software or hardware (history phd’s need white gloves and magnifying lenses, not usually workstations), it’s pretty reassuring to know that the mac pro’s old guts can still pull ahead with OSX’s compiler and other software stuff. I’m curious what your verdict on the mac pro is in the end though, are you confident that apple isn’t going to kill the whole pro line?

Re: The rest, incredibly sloppy on someone's behalf getting the machine to you, but it doesn't make the clearly negative bent at the beginning good journalism. Why critique what just, plainly, simply doesn't matter? Why deride specs about the machine only to going to disregard them the next clause?

The article comes off as having a hugely anti-Dell bent. The HP review is glowing, the Dell review is dour.

I guess I'm lucky to work in an industry where performance is a luxury rather than a necessity, but I still can't understand why so many people are pushing for the latest and greatest hardware.

We have been working for years and years on machines significantly slower than anything available today and have always been perfectly capable of getting work done.

In the real world, having the latest and greatest hardware is way down on the list of priorities. Certainly much lower than, say, what software runs on a machine.

For how I work, Unix is a necessity. My windows using colleagues (who are in the minority btw) are all either either running linux in a virtual machine or actually have a dedicated linux server in another room. Either way, every file they edit is a network share pointing to that linux VM or server.

I refuse to put up with the headaches of network fileshares, so I will always either use OS X or Linux. And OS X is a clear winner in my opinion, though most of my colleagues prefer Linux.

I'm genuinely interested and concerned by the lack of a faster Mac Pro, but whatever the reason it doesn't matter - you can't run OS X on any of these machines, and Linux is not good enough to justify the slight performance improvement.

I must agree with the comments about the Dell/HP inconsistency. Comparing the Z820 to the correct Dell equivalent, the T7600 at a first glance shows a much better high-performance chassis that shouldfic all of your woes with the T5600 chassis. Just as an example the T7600 has 4x3.5" bays + 4x 2.5" bays compared to the Z820's mere 4x3.5" bays.

Now, as I understand it, Dell sent you a machine upon request, so assuming you requested a machine for straight-up performance evaluation, the T5600 is more than adequate for a review. As a reviewer, you should factor in target markets of each machine you review before complaining about lack of expansion or poor cable management: or poor build quality. For this reason, I'll disregard everything but the performance review in this article. AnandTech I must say has much better deployment/sysadming analysis than you have demonstrated here.

Of course, you can still build your own workstation, but I’m writing this for an audience who needs top-tier support and doesn’t want to chase six different companies when something goes wrong.

I think it is a bit disappointing that this article did not review the two companies' support in more detail, especially considering the minor problems that the author encountered (receiving a non-working RedHat Linux disc from HP and Dell giving wrong information about their machine's drive bays).

I guess I'm lucky to work in an industry where performance is a luxury rather than a necessity, but I still can't understand why so many people are pushing for the latest and greatest hardware.

We have been working for years and years on machines significantly slower than anything available today and have always been perfectly capable of getting work done.

In the real world, having the latest and greatest hardware is way down on the list of priorities. Certainly much lower than, say, what software runs on a machine.

You are lucky. A lot of 3D/compositing/FX work is working with big objects in memory. Having more performance at the fingertips allows you to work with bigger objects (usually equaling better visual quality) and/or the computer being responsive enough so you feel you're not fighting the computer to express your creative ideas.

Isn't compute performance for Kepler in general quite mediocre, period? Might not just be an issue of drivers, last I checked Nvidia had difficulties with "Big Kepler" and had to push back the launch, and the more purely gaming focused GK104 gets generally slaughtered in compute by both GCN and Nvidia's own previous gen Fermi products. Just not the focus of the chip, although GK110 will presumably fix all that.

I was talking about OpenGL performance. It's apparently crippled with the Kepler cards.

Aaron - I asked Dell to configure a system to match the HP Z820 for price/performance and that was meant to appeal to a Mac Pro user. This is what they sent. Adding $700 would just make it that much less appealing to a Mac Pro user and I doubt it would address my issues with build quality.

Quote:

The HP review is glowing, the Dell review is dour.

yes, and yes. I had no experience with either an HP or a Dell workstation before this. I have no biases here towards either company. I don't get to keep this stuff and I cold called both PR companies for this.

ZeDestructor - I'm not reviewing this for SQL servers. Anandtech does a great job at reviewing server hardware – this is completely different. I doubt many of their guys know how to use a nodal compositor.

Quote:

I think it is a bit disappointing that this article did not review the two companies' support in more detail, especially considering the minor problems that the author encountered (receiving a non-working RedHat Linux disc from HP and Dell giving wrong information about their machine's drive bays).

As I mentioned in the part that talked about Redhat not working, it's impossible to test this as a regular customer, unfortunately. We deal with PR reps, not support and I can't get customer support without actually having bought the unit. It's a little weird but this is par for the course when you do hardware reviews. If I have a problem with a Quadro when doing a review, I have to talk to my PR rep who gets someone on it. It's how it's done - and I realize it doesn't give you much of an idea of what support is like.

My primary home system is a T5600, dual 8 core Xeons and 64 GB of RAM. The main issue I have in it, as you said, is the lack of spaces to put HDD's but also being forced to realy use the PERC to connect more than two systems. Dell claims the two onboard SATA connections should ONLY be used for optical media, and all magnetic media is hung off of the PERC controller.

But was it worse is the limited power connections from the PSU for higher powered video cards as there is only one 6-pin PCI-E power dongle, and my higher end video card require at least two and with more than two HDD's (if you can find room) , you really have no way of getting another 6-pin to the video card, meaning I'm limited to the mid level 3d cards or high level 2d cards.

I was talking about OpenGL performance. It's apparently crippled with the Kepler cards.

Ah, that's a bummer then. I assume it's purely driver related, I wonder how it compares under OS X/Linux. Hacking cards in obviously is of no value in a professional environment for the reason of support, but from a technical POV I'd be curious. I'll have to try it out if I end up putting a 670/680 in my 3,1, or see if someone else can give it a spin.

Evil_Merlin wrote:

But was it worse is the limited power connections from the PSU for higher powered video cards as there is only one 6-pin PCI-E power dongle, and my higher end video card require at least two and with more than two HDD's (if you can find room) , you really have no way of getting another 6-pin to the video card, meaning I'm limited to the mid level 3d cards or high level 2d cards.

Limited connectors is always irritating, particularly on a high end machine (and triply so when the PSU is in fact plenty beefy, looking at you Apple). BEIGE's splitter solution would be the simplest if possible, but FWIW, if you've got a free 5.25" bay one brute force solution might be a secondary dedicated power supply ala the FSP X5. Not elegant, but the unit I saw was very quiet and it seems to get the job done.

Of course, you can still build your own workstation, but I’m writing this for an audience who needs top-tier support and doesn’t want to chase six different companies when something goes wrong.

I think it is a bit disappointing that this article did not review the two companies' support in more detail, especially considering the minor problems that the author encountered (receiving a non-working RedHat Linux disc from HP and Dell giving wrong information about their machine's drive bays).

Quite. If you are going with "vendor support" to avoid the "problems" of a bespoke system then it is a crucial thing to validate. You don't really know just how good that "top tier support" will be until you try to actually use it. This is true for serious Unix server vendors, never mind glorified PCs.

As business/enterprise vendors, it seems that this is the biggest thing that either HP or Dell can bring to the table. They sell and support 6 figure machines running 7 figure software.

The robustness of those support options might even negate the value of having updated hardware for the Apple option. Does Apple even offer an option beyond "leave it at the Genius Bar and wait 2 weeks"?

Was expecting a thorough kick on the Mac Pro's computational power's behind when I opened the link to this article, turns out reality was more varied than that. I can now certainly appreciate why some feel left out in the cold by Apple.

Also: I predict Popcorn Time in this thread.

Me too. I was pleasantly surprised by its competitive numbers.I would have a hard time trying to justify a $8k HP replacement, on top of migrating software and workflows for quite a bit of these applications. the sky isn't really falling as a pro user IMO. Hopefully the '13 refresh will put a new stamp into the professional world like the rMBP has.

JEDIDIAH wrote:

Quite. If you are going with "vendor support" to avoid the "problems" of a bespoke system then it is a crucial thing to validate. You don't really know just how good that "top tier support" will be until you try to actually use it. This is true for serious Unix server vendors, never mind glorified PCs.

As business/enterprise vendors, it seems that this is the biggest thing that either HP or Dell can bring to the table. They sell and support 6 figure machines running 7 figure software.

The robustness of those support options might even negate the value of having updated hardware for the Apple option. Does Apple even offer an option beyond "leave it at the Genius Bar and wait 2 weeks"?

From my experience with dell and HP (Similar with Sprint, AT&T too..) is if you have a "business" tag next to your account, and they see a handful of 0's, you get top notch support. Especially as an admin. I've had to replace Dell LCD's and they just shipped us one to install, and we shipped the broken one back. It wasn't a mission critical repair, but it was certainly on par with Applecare. The only real difference here is the Business contract costs a ton, while Applecare is available to the lowest level consumer. That is certainly something to consider on the flip side IMO.

The on-site HP support is just awesome... I am always shocked to see "professional" people lugging their MacPros into a mac store... HP will be there within hours (if someone is in town) and fix your machine, and will also give you a replacement should it need to be sent out... Really an awesome service especially if you NEED your machine.

I live in Cheesehole, WI and I use a slightly older HP Z200 workstation (dual core i5 at 3.3 or 3.4 GHz and a Quadro 2000 gfx card) as my primary Pro/ENGINEER / Solidworks / FloEFD box at work. Is this on-site support thing optional or a recent offering? We've had other users at work with identical machines to mine go down with hardware failures and HP didn't send a soul, to my knowledge, to do anything. Everything was handled over the phone with replacement parts shipped next-day or second-day air. The most common failure we've had has been HDD failure, in which case, we simply picked up a larger drive from a local vendor, or used a spare that the IT guys had around, in order to get back up and running ASAP.

Thanks for the heads up, this is a GTX670. So I may have to order the large PSU first.

I hope you aren't depending on Nvidia 6xx levels cards for their compute functions, which are horribly crippled in the 6xx series. You can Google this if you'd like. Stick to high end 5xx cards for workstations that depend on nvidia specific compute functions.

The fact that there is no difference in gaming vs professional GPU driver support on OSX interested me. Is this likely to continue for long? Surely this sort of thing is unsustainable for graphics card manufacturers - I was under the impression that their gaming development was almost fully subsidised by sales of underpowered professional cards with less gimped drivers.

More a review of the machines you were sent by PR than the actual machines a workstation buyer would purchase thereby making this of limited use --- except perhaps to point out how strongly the MP stands up.

Jedediah - Apple offers on-site service contracts. I've rarely waited more than a few days for an in-store fix, even with out-of-stock parts.

As you said, applecare is great if you live in a city where there is a store other than when they look at you like you have horns growing out of your skull when you bring in a mac pro. On top of that, not having parts in stock is a pain in the ass. Compare that to the Dell and hp support I've had for their workstation line and you have parts and a tech onsite the next day. You get what you pay for in regards to Applecare and a mac pro as you pointed out. Applecare is simply not up to professional support in a timely manner. I have noticed in enterprise agreements Apple only lists New York city and LA as places they offer onsite service.

After lousy support on our mac pro we have decided no more of them, we'll stick with HP's.

More a review of the machines you were sent by PR than the actual machines a workstation buyer would purchase thereby making this of limited use --- except perhaps to point out how strongly the MP stands up.

What part of "this is likely what would replace the middle tier Mac Pro I bought" didn't seem likely? I think the HP ends up looking really good, considering the warranty and price. It's just too noisy - if you got a $10k version, that won't change.

Isn't compute performance for Kepler in general quite mediocre, period? Might not just be an issue of drivers, last I checked Nvidia had difficulties with "Big Kepler" and had to push back the launch, and the more purely gaming focused GK104 gets generally slaughtered in compute by both GCN and Nvidia's own previous gen Fermi products. Just not the focus of the chip, although GK110 will presumably fix all that.

I was talking about OpenGL performance. It's apparently crippled with the Kepler cards.

Aaron - I asked Dell to configure a system to match the HP Z820 for price/performance and that was meant to appeal to a Mac Pro user. This is what they sent. Adding $700 would just make it that much less appealing to a Mac Pro user and I doubt it would address my issues with build quality.

Quote:

The HP review is glowing, the Dell review is dour.

yes, and yes. I had no experience with either an HP or a Dell workstation before this. I have no biases here towards either company. I don't get to keep this stuff and I cold called both PR companies for this.

ZeDestructor - I'm not reviewing this for SQL servers. Anandtech does a great job at reviewing server hardware – this is completely different. I doubt many of their guys know how to use a nodal compositor.

Quote:

I think it is a bit disappointing that this article did not review the two companies' support in more detail, especially considering the minor problems that the author encountered (receiving a non-working RedHat Linux disc from HP and Dell giving wrong information about their machine's drive bays).

As I mentioned in the part that talked about Redhat not working, it's impossible to test this as a regular customer, unfortunately. We deal with PR reps, not support and I can't get customer support without actually having bought the unit. It's a little weird but this is par for the course when you do hardware reviews. If I have a problem with a Quadro when doing a review, I have to talk to my PR rep who gets someone on it. It's how it's done - and I realize it doesn't give you much of an idea of what support is like.

I think you missed what the guy was saying. The T7600 is the more correct matchup and it's $600 CHEAPER than the T5600 you compared the HP against. Honestly, this roundup would have been a TON better if you were to get in touch with Dell PR and ask for a similarly configured T7600 and update the review. Hell, maybe even compare a similarly configured Lenovo ThinkCentre D30. Wishful thinking, probably, but it would still make this seem a bit less biased (I realize you're NOT biased, but the review makes it appear as such.)

It's funny because the test results don't justify the statement that the Mac Pro is a poor value for its level of performance. The main criticism seems to be that it isn't new and shiny.

Eh? A 2.66 12-core 2010 Mac Pro (the newest model) as specced with a Quadro 4000 and AppleCare is $6600, so it's close to the same price. It doesn't lose everywhere, but where it does it loses pretty badly, and it's obvious it could do much better if it wasn't stuck on ancient technology. Scores for 570s/580s in Mac Pros are plenty enough to show that. It uses more power. It has fewer, slower expansion slots.

It's not like it's useless, and if Apple ever dropped the price on ancient stuff ever then it might have a place, but at that price it's absolutely a poor value. Remember too that going forward, compilers will improve, drivers will get fixed, programs will get updated and the OS will continue to evolve. There is a much higher potential performance ceiling on the E5 and newer cards vs old systems. The deltas aren't going to get any better.